The Merchant of Menace jj-10

by Jill Churchill

  She pulled the curtains back and looked at the wreck of their backyard. The police had certainly churned up the snow with their rakes. As Jane's eyes adjusted to the relative darkness outside, she noticed that one space between the houses must have been raked clear down to the grass. There was a dark area.

  She squinted her eyes. The dark area looked almost like a person.

  Actually, the dark area looked exactly like a person.

  She reached once more for the phone and dialed Mel's number.

  Twenty-two ·.,

  Jane woke at nine in a state of instant panic. '? Bruce Pargeter was coming over to work on the broken pipe. More important, Mel would certainly check in and she was desperately eager to hear what he'd have to say about the events of last night.

  She'd been unable to get to sleep until almost four in the morning and now staggered put of bed, bleary and tired and pointedly avoiding looking out the bedroom or bathroom windows. She could hear voices downstairs. She showered and dressed hurriedly and threw on a bare minimum of makeup. Just enough that the bags under her eyes wouldn't actually frighten impressionable young children. Not that there were likely to be any around.

  “Mom, Mel called while you were in the shower," Mike said when she came downstairs. "Said she was probably going to be okay. He's stopping by in a couple minutes.”

  Jane nodded and made her way to the coffeemaker. Thank God! Mike had started it for her. She poured a cup, added lots of cream and sugar, and gulped it down as quickly as she could. Ah… caffeine!

  “What's that noise?" she asked Mike as she came closer to full consciousness.

  “Bruce Pargeter. In the basement fixing things," Mike said.

  Jane looked at Katie, who was excavating her cereal for raisins. "You can buy boxes of raisins, you know," Jane said. "All by themselves."

  “But they aren't sugary or wet," Katie said. "What went on last night?"

  “Somebody tried to bump off that reporter," Mike said. "The redheaded woman, Ginger.”

  “Why?" Katie asked.

  Mike shrugged. Jane said, "We don't know.”

  “Maybe Mel does," Mike said. "Here he comes.”

  Katie, still in her robe and fuzzy slippers, went away to get dressed.

  “You, too, Todd," Jane shouted into the living room where her youngest was cruising television channels. "No slobbing around in jam-mies.”

  Mel looked as exhausted as Jane felt. She wondered if men didn't sometimes wish they could use makeup to spruce themselves up a bit. "Ginger's okay?" she asked, as she slipped some bread into the toaster for him.

  “Not okay. But she'll make it," he said. "She's suffered frostbite, a concussion, and has a broken wrist. She only regained consciousness about an hour ago."

  “Did you get to talk to her?"

  “Yes, but she wasn't making much sense. Hadno idea what she was doing in a hospital. The last thing she seems to remember is talking to me in your driveway. The doctor says she'll probably get more of her memory back, but may not ever remember what happened to her."

  “So you don't know who hit her?"

  “Nope. It wasn't that much of a blow, though. But it must have thrown her against the gas meter at the side of the house and she hit her head on it and apparently snapped her wrist trying to break her fall. At least, that's what the emergency-room people speculated. They were a lot more concerned with her temperature. She must have laid there in the cold for several hours. If she hadn't been wearing a hat and gloves and a heavy coat, she'd have probably died of exposure."

  “Do you think that means whoever it was didn't mean to kill her?" Jane asked.

  “Whatever the original intention was, she was left to die. It comes to the same thing as far as I'm concerned. If you hadn't peered out the window and seen her, she would have."

  “Is this a tribute to what you call my snooping?”

  He smiled. "I guess it is. It saved Ginger's life.”

  While he was feeling mellow and benevolent, Jane needed to ask something else. "What about the computer disk I found? Have the people in your office read it yet?"

  “Nope. There are files on it, but they're password protected. They're going to have to get help from the F.B.I. probably. They have super-duper computers that can run through thou‑ sands of combinations of letters and numbers until they hit on the right one.”

  Jane poured another half a cup of coffee and debated with herself for a few seconds. " 'Guardian; " she said.

  “What?"

  “ 'Guardian' is the password."

  “How the hell would you know that?" Mel asked. He held up his hand. "No, wait. I'll bet you made a copy of that disk before you gave it to me. Am I right? I should have known! Jane, that was evidence. You had no business messing with it!"

  “It wasn't evidence while it was just an unidentified disk in my house," she said. "It was just an unfamiliar… thing."

  “You know the law on this? Never mind. How did you figure out the password?"

  “Shelley and I figured it out rationally. It's our secret.”

  Jane wouldn't have thought it was possible for human features to express both gratitude and irritation at the same time, but Mel managed it. He went to the kitchen phone and dialed his office. "Harry? Try the word 'guardian' on that disk. Just a hunch." He winked at Jane. "Right. I'll wait. A foreign language? What language? Find someone who recognizes it. Okay, I'll call back.”

  He hung up and stared at Jane. "Why didn't you tell me that part?"

  “You didn't give me the chance. I sent a piece of it to my father though. He'll know. Stay here. I'll show you the printout of the files."

  “The printout of the files," Mel groaned. "Are you setting up your own annex to the police department?"

  “I might, if I had the extra space," Jane said over her shoulder as she went to the living room to fetch her papers.

  Mel studied the sheets. "Looks Eastern European to me. But then I don't know anything except enough Spanish to order a dinner and a few obscene French phrases."

  “Oops, your toast's gone cold. I forgot it." Jane put in two more slices while Mel continued to peruse the papers she'd handed him.

  “Have you remembered anything else Ginger said when she was talking to you last night?" Mel asked.

  “I told you the whole thing then. She wanted to interview me, I said no. She asked if the police had found the disk and I told her no again. I didn't think I should have told anyone and wasn't positive it was the right disk anyway. I feel bad about that now."

  “Why? You did exactly the right thing," Mel said.

  “But she was probably over in the Johnsons' yard looking for it when she was attacked. If she'd known it had been found, nothing would have happened to her."

  “You can't know that, Jane. Someone may have been following and watching her and would have cornered her somewhere eventually."

  “Was there any physical evidence in the John-sons' yard? A bloody glove or anything like that?”

  Mel frowned. "There is one odd thing. Footprints, we think."

  “You think?"

  “It's hard to tell. We must have stepped on every inch of the snow yesterday while we were raking it up. The whole yard is footprints. But there are a couple strange ones near where Ginger was."

  “Strange in what way? Big, little? Pigeon-toed?"

  “Big. And more rectangular than most shoes."

  “Something foreign? Ethnic boots of some sort? Aren't traditional Japanese shoes sort of rectangular? Is there a sole pattern?"

  “Not much. This is such a light, dry snow that it just packs into the pattern after a step or two. One of my men thinks he can see a row of diamond shapes in one of the prints, but I think he has too good an imagination."

  “But you think these weird shoe prints belong to her attacker?"

  “They could. Or somebody could have just been prowling around earlier.”

  Bruce Pargeter came up from the basement with an assortment of tools bulging out of
a large, beat-up toolbox. "You're all done, Mrs. Jeffry. Try running the water in the guest bathroom. Let it run for a while.”

  Mel excused himself from plumbing matters and left. Jane noticed that he took her printouts of Lance's computer disk with him. No matter, she could print them out again. Mel hadn't thought to ask her to turn over her copy.

  “Bruce, give me a bill right away and let's sit down and talk about redoing that bathroom," Jane said, back in fully domestic mode.

  After Bruce had outlined his ideas for redoing the bathroom, which all sounded good, especially considering that Jane had no ideas of her own in the matter, he left. She'd considered trying to keep him there and chat about the murder and the attack on Ginger, but had an eerie feeling that she shouldn't. It was as if she'd had her quota of good luck in finding things out and if she pushed it any harder, she might get in trouble of some sort. She didn't want to know more about it — she wanted the police to solve it and let her occupy her mind with celebrating the holidays.

  She checked the computer for return E-mail from her father, but there was nothing but a spam ad from somebody called "HotChick" saying if the recipient of the note would send $29.95 to a post office box address, a complete guide to curing impotence would be forthcoming.

  Jane hit the delete button. She used to send irate responses to junk like this, but it was fruitless.

  She wrapped the last of the presents, prepared a new grocery list, and hit the mall. By the time she got home, she was nearly asleep on her feet. She checked E-mail again, found none, and decided she really needed a good nap. Not a few minutes of sleep on the sofa, but a real turnoff-the-phone, get-in-bed nap. She set sandwich makings on the kitchen counter and told the kids she wasn't to be disturbed for any reason for at least two hours.

  This unusual request must have alarmed the kids, she realized three hours later. While she slept, they had cleaned the house, even their own rooms. Katie had consulted some cookbooks and was preparing chicken soup. Mike had shoveled the entire driveway and put out the trash and recycle bins for tomorrow morning's pickup. Todd had washed, dried, and brushed Willard, who was now so staticky that he looked like a big yellow tumbleweed.

  “Good heavens!" she exclaimed. "All this because I took a nap?"

  “We thought you were sick and wanted everything nice for you," Katie said.

  “That's very sweet of you all," Jane said. "But I was just tired. Now I feel great.”

  And she did. Amazing what a little sleep could do.

  “You don't want chicken soup?" Katie asked.

  “Why don't we all have it with dinner?”

  This settled and the kids reassured that she wasn't ill, Jane checked her E-mail again. This time there was a note from her father saying the Jeffry family's Christmas packages had arrived in good order and that her peculiar note wasn't a foreign language. Change each consonant to the one that comes before it, his note said. Same with the vowels. Who is Julianne Newton and why does anybody care if she was a stripper in college and might have been a prostitute? You aren't involved in another murder, are you? Your mother worries. Love, Dad.

  Twenty-three

  E ven the knowledge of the code didn't help · much. Jane phoned Mel with her father's information, then went over to Shelley's.

  “My dad broke the code. Where are the printouts?" she said.

  Shelley shoved a pair of cake pans, half full of a pink batter, into the oven and ran to get her paperwork. They ended up having to write the alphabet down to keep the letters straight, but quickly had the files deciphered.

  Jane looked over the results. "For all the trouble this has been, there's not much of a payoff, is there?"

  “I certainly expected something juicier," Shelley agreed.

  Most of the notes were extremely sketchy. About a stockbroker down the street, Lance only gave the name of the man's firm and a remark about possible inside trading. Jane's said, Jeffry pharmacies? Work there? Ask customers about mistakes. Shelley's said, Paul Nowack. Polish, but Greek food. Check with random health inspectors.

  “This looks like nothing at all," Jane said.

  “I'm going to call Julie and ask if she was a stripper," Shelley said. "Hers is one of the more specific and I'm curious to know if there's any truth whatsoever to it."

  “You're sure you want to do that? If she was, she's ashamed of it. Her husband works for a bank. They're pretty stuffy, you know."

  “Maybe twenty years ago something like that would have mattered. But nobody takes stuff like that seriously, unless it's a politician or public figure.”

  Julie didn't seem to be offended. "I wasn't a stripper, I was a go-go dancer. Not many clothes, but some. Why on earth are you asking?”

  Shelley didn't have an answer ready and just said, "I'll tell you later." She repeated what Julie had said to Jane. "If she was upset about being asked, she sure didn't show it," Shelley added.

  They went back to the list. Bruce Pargetersame as Pargeter in KY. Asked around for home repair recommendations. No complaints.

  “Poor old Lance, striking out everywhere," Jane said.

  Sam Dwyer's file only said, Florida. Child.

  There wasn't a file for Sharon Wilhite. Presumably anything he knew about her was in his head and didn't require notes.

  The rest were all people who didn't appear to have any involvement with his murder. Some had left the neighborhood long ago. Several were people who had been absolutely proven to be out of town at the time of the murder.

  “I'm really disappointed," Jane said. "He didn't really know much of anything about anybody. It was all bluff and speculation.”

  Shelley shook her head. "Maybe. But then he could have just kept some of these notes as reminders of what he did know. And there might be other disks someplace with more detail.”

  Jane stood up. "I'm going home. I'm sick of this and starting to feel like I just don't care who killed the jerk and why. I'm going to quit thinking about it and enjoy the holidays."

  “Lucky for us that we can just put it aside," Shelley said. "Poor Mel can't."

  “I know. But we can't solve every case for him.”

  Shelley laughed. "I'm going to tell him you said that!"

  “Don't you dare!”

  Jane was so firmly resolved to stop thinking about the murder that she almost succeeded. She fixed a nice family dinner to go with Katie's chicken soup. She read a couple chapters of a mystery that she thought was too easy to solve, but discovered that her solution had been wrong all along. She tried out a new rinse on her hair that turned out fairly well, but did some serious damage to one of her favorite towels. She found some Static Guard to spray on Willard as the kids had discovered that petting him in the dark generated sparks. She called and had a conversation with Uncle Jim about Christmas dinner, then girded herself to call her sister. Marty, fortunately, was just getting ready to go out to a party and Jane felt blessed indeed that they didn't have to talk very long. Still, Marty man‑ aged to make three irritating comments and two downright stupid remarks.

  As she went upstairs to bed, she reminded Todd that he had to get up fairly early the next morning.

  “Why?”

  “Have you forgotten? Pet got those tickets to some Christmas movie that's opening at ten.”

  Todd was torn. He wanted to see the movie, but didn't want to have to drag Pet along. Jane pointed out that the tickets were scarce and he hadn't managed to bag his own — Pet had, and it was she dragging him along.

  Jane went to bed early, slept like a rock, and was wide awake by seven — with nothing to do. She could hardly remember a time when she didn't have at least the tail end of a "to do" list pending. She let the pets outside, let them back in and fed them. This always had to be done early on Tuesdays because the trash trucks came later in the morning, terrifying the cats and moving Willard to bark his fool head off. Jane went back to bed with a new mystery book that was already overdue at the library. But she couldn't quite get into it.

  She
was as twitchy today as Julie Newton always was. Maybe that was Julie's problem — she got too much sleep. She tried picturing Julie as a go-go dancer. It wasn't hard. Go-go dancing, as Jane recalled, was all twitching.

  Had Julie told Shelley the truth? Even if Julie really had been a stripper and Lance had proof, could it be a reason to kill him? As deep, dark secrets went, it wasn't a very good one.

  The only person on the files who appeared to really have something to fear from Lance was Bruce Pargeter. And he freely admitted that he despised the man. And he really didn't have a good alibi for the night Lance was killed. He and his mother were both at home, but she was upstairs and he was in the basement. Even if she had suspected that Bruce had left the house, she certainly wouldn't have let on. He was her son. And the man who was murdered had been largely responsible for her own husband's death.

  Jane had the sense that something was stirring around furtively at the back of her brain. Did her subconscious know something it was refusing to let go of? Or was she just hyper because she'd gotten too much sleep?

  At nine, she woke Todd and called Mel. "Anything new?" she asked.

  “Not a thing except that the files on the disk were a bust, which I guess you know."

  “Boring, aren't they." She told him about Shelley's phone conversation with Julie Newton.

  “Yes, Julie called earlier. There was something in the paper this morning about the disk having been found and she put two and two together."

  “How did the newspaper find out?"

  “We told them. And emphasized that we felt there was nothing of use to the investigation on it. I didn't want anybody else bashed around in pursuit of the damned thing. And Ginger is doing well," he added. "She still can't remember what happened to her, but her health is much improved."

  “That's good to hear."

  “You sound preoccupied," Mel said.

  “I am. There's something on the fringe of my mind I can't get a hold on. Something about the attack on Ginger."